A total solar eclipse – the entire sun blocked by the passage of the moon – is one of the most awe-inspiring natural events you can experience. I travelled to Germany to view one in 1999, and I remember it vividly today. The light getting gradually dimmer and dimmer, a deep twilight and then the sudden and dramatic transition into total darkness.

Today will see America’s first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in almost a century. You need to be in quite a narrow band of the U.S. to experience the totality in person, but if you’re not able to do so, there are plenty of ways to livestream the event …

When you need a spacecraft to fire its rocket for 35 minutes some five years after it left Earth, there has to be an anxious moment or two wondering whether it will work – all the more so when it’s been subjected to a radiation dose equivalent to a million dental x-rays. But NASA’s Juno probe performed perfectly, and Google is celebrating the fact with an animated Doodle …

According to Steve Jurvetson, venture capitalist and board member at pioneer quantum computing company D-WAVE (as well as others, such as Tesla and SpaceX), Google has what may be a “watershed” quantum computing announcement scheduled for early next month. This comes as D-WAVE, which notably also holds the Mountain View company as a customer, has just sold a 1000+ Qubit 2X quantum computer to national security research institution Los Alamos… expand full story

Google is testing its Project Wing unmanned aircrafts, otherwise known as drones, over United States soil with quiet approval by NASA, according to a new report by the Guardian. The technology giant would otherwise have to receive a 333 exemption by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a waiver issued to commercial companies testing the use of UASs (unmanned aircrafts), as the commercial operation of these aircrafts is banned in the United States.

Google has been using NASA’s Moffett Airfield as a home and launch pad for its private jets for several years now, but today, the company announced that it has singed a deal with NASA in which it will lease the airfield for the next 60 years. Google, via its real estate organization Planetary Ventures, will contribute $1.16 billion to the facilities over the lease, reducing NASA’s operation costs by $6.3 million annually.

Robots aboard the International Space Station will soon be equipped with depth sensing smartphones courtesy of Google. The space-ready handsets will be from the search giant’s Project Tango initiative that uses 3D image tracking technology to map their surroundings. The phones with hitch a ride on a cargo spacecraft scheduled to launch on July 11th and will be the eyes and ears of NASA’s Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites (SPHERES).